Computer engineering
• How can we build an efficient computer?
For artificial intelligence to succeed, we need two things: intelligence and an artifact. The computer has been the artifact of choice. The modern digital electronic computer was invented independently and almost simultaneously by scientists in three countries embattled in World War II. The first operational computer was the electromechanical Heath Robinson,8 built in 1940 by Alan Turing’s team for a single purpose: deciphering German messages. In 1943, the same group developed the Colossus, a powerful general-purpose machine based on vacuum tubes.9 The first operational programmable computer was the Z-3, the invention of Konrad Zuse in Germany in 1941. Zuse also invented floating-point numbers and the first high-level programming language, Plankalk¨ul. The first electronic computer, the ABC, was assembled by John Atanasoff and his student Clifford Berry between 1940 and 1942 at Iowa State University.
Atanasoff’s research received little support or recognition; it was the ENIAC, developed as part of a secret military project at the University of Pennsylvania by a team including John Mauchly and John Eckert, that proved to be the most influential forerunner of modern computers. Since that time, each generation of computer hardware has brought an increase in speed andcapacity andadecrease inprice. Performance doubled every18monthsorsountilaround 2005, when power dissipation problems led manufacturers to start multiplying the number of CPU cores ratherthantheclockspeed. Currentexpectations arethatfutureincreases inpower will come from massive parallelism—a curious convergence with the properties of the brain. Of course, there were calculating devices before the electronic computer. The earliest automated machines, dating from the 17th century, were discussed on page 6. The first programmable machine was a loom, devised in 1805 by Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752–1834), that used punched cards to store instructions for the pattern to be woven. In the mid-19th century, Charles Babbage (1792–1871) designed two machines, neither of which he completed. The Difference Engine was intended to compute mathematical tables for engineering and scientific projects. It was finally built and shown to work in 1991 at the Science Museum in London (Swade, 2000).
Babbage’s Analytical Engine was far more ambitious: it included addressable memory, stored programs, and conditional jumps and was the first artifact capable of universal computation. Babbage’s colleague Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, was perhaps the world’s first programmer. (The programming language Ada is named after her.) She wrote programs for the unfinished Analytical Engine and even speculated that the machine could play chess or compose music. AI also owes a debt to the software side of computer science, which has supplied the operating systems, programming languages, and tools needed to write modern programs (and papers about them). But this is one area where the debt has been repaid: work in AI has pioneered many ideas that have made their way back to mainstream computer science, including time sharing, interactive interpreters, personal computers with windows and mice, rapid development environments, the linked list data type, automatic storage management, and key concepts of symbolic, functional, declarative, and object-oriented programming.
• How can we build an efficient computer?
For artificial intelligence to succeed, we need two things: intelligence and an artifact. The computer has been the artifact of choice. The modern digital electronic computer was invented independently and almost simultaneously by scientists in three countries embattled in World War II. The first operational computer was the electromechanical Heath Robinson,8 built in 1940 by Alan Turing’s team for a single purpose: deciphering German messages. In 1943, the same group developed the Colossus, a powerful general-purpose machine based on vacuum tubes.9 The first operational programmable computer was the Z-3, the invention of Konrad Zuse in Germany in 1941. Zuse also invented floating-point numbers and the first high-level programming language, Plankalk¨ul. The first electronic computer, the ABC, was assembled by John Atanasoff and his student Clifford Berry between 1940 and 1942 at Iowa State University.
Atanasoff’s research received little support or recognition; it was the ENIAC, developed as part of a secret military project at the University of Pennsylvania by a team including John Mauchly and John Eckert, that proved to be the most influential forerunner of modern computers. Since that time, each generation of computer hardware has brought an increase in speed andcapacity andadecrease inprice. Performance doubled every18monthsorsountilaround 2005, when power dissipation problems led manufacturers to start multiplying the number of CPU cores ratherthantheclockspeed. Currentexpectations arethatfutureincreases inpower will come from massive parallelism—a curious convergence with the properties of the brain. Of course, there were calculating devices before the electronic computer. The earliest automated machines, dating from the 17th century, were discussed on page 6. The first programmable machine was a loom, devised in 1805 by Joseph Marie Jacquard (1752–1834), that used punched cards to store instructions for the pattern to be woven. In the mid-19th century, Charles Babbage (1792–1871) designed two machines, neither of which he completed. The Difference Engine was intended to compute mathematical tables for engineering and scientific projects. It was finally built and shown to work in 1991 at the Science Museum in London (Swade, 2000).
Babbage’s Analytical Engine was far more ambitious: it included addressable memory, stored programs, and conditional jumps and was the first artifact capable of universal computation. Babbage’s colleague Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, was perhaps the world’s first programmer. (The programming language Ada is named after her.) She wrote programs for the unfinished Analytical Engine and even speculated that the machine could play chess or compose music. AI also owes a debt to the software side of computer science, which has supplied the operating systems, programming languages, and tools needed to write modern programs (and papers about them). But this is one area where the debt has been repaid: work in AI has pioneered many ideas that have made their way back to mainstream computer science, including time sharing, interactive interpreters, personal computers with windows and mice, rapid development environments, the linked list data type, automatic storage management, and key concepts of symbolic, functional, declarative, and object-oriented programming.
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